12 sessions recommended
This work interweaves personal transformation and planetary well-being. Our initial session begins with a conversation about your consumption patterns, viewed through an interdependent lens,, illuminating how material acquisitions can unconsciously interact with the wider world. We’ll conduct a carbon footprint assessment to benchmark your current lifestyle against global averages.
Together, we’ll develop strategies to improve your relationship with the natural world by modifying consumption patterns and fostering a more mutualistic connection with the living world. Throughout this process, we’ll engage in contemplative practices designed to deepen your understanding of how your choices create the future and shape your interactions with the planet and its inhabitants.
You’ll learn to feel more deeply into materiality, cultivating a profound sense of reverence and compassion for the more-than-human world, ultimately living in accord with these powerful realizations.
My Journey into Ecological Embeddedness
My early years, like many Americans in the late 90s and early 2000s, were defined by constant commutes, processed foods, and a diet heavy in pizza, soda, and sugary drinks. This lifestyle culminated in the (un?)fortunate discovery of absurdly high cholesterol at just 19 years old. While this didn’t immediately illuminate the interconnectedness of my consumption and the planet, it certainly created a crack where I began to question my consumption patterns.
A profound realization about our consumption habits took root during my yoga teacher training. As a contemplative exercise, I considered what Ahimsa, the first Yama (ethical precept) of yoga, might imply about my life. Ahimsa, roughly translating to non-harm, is a devotion to eliminating thoughts, words, and actions that cause harm. As I began to intuit the stories behind everything I owned or purchased, my interdependence began to reveal itself.
“As within, so without,” and “as above, so below,” both point to a deep truth: every sense impression we take in has a story of cause and effect behind it – a transformation of energy into form that arrives into our awareness through our senses. These stories, and our relationship to them, form the great ocean of the subconscious. When we illuminate these depths with the light of our heart-minds, we often discover how we might be actively supporting and creating realities we would otherwise abhor.
This is precisely why the practice of Ecological Embeddedness is so powerful. It invites us to become conscious of every relationship on our path and the realities those relationships create. This process of becoming conscious naturally begins to simplify and purify our relationship with each sense experience. We discover the needless suffering we inflict on our interdependent selves, and in turn, cease participating in our own self-destruction.
